Random Number: Lord Sundance | Pretty Lord Sundance

So, I started watching Valley of the Boom on NatGeo last week. It’s OK, but nothing to write home about — just the umpteenth show about the early days of the Internet, Silicon Valley, the tech bubble and other stuff that’s mostly been covered elsewhere. Still, it has a few things that make it worth checking out: 1) A decent cast that includes Bradley Whitford and the always-interesting Steve Zahn; 2) A loose, irreverent style that mixes drama, documentary footage, talking-head interviews and even puppetry; 3) A crate-digging soundtrack that includes top-shelf obscurities and oddities from the worlds of rap (Blac Haze’s Get Loose), funk (Phunklogistix’s Dirt & Perseverance), thrash-metal (Lucian Blaque’s Bring Them Down) and indie-rock (Railroad Jerks’ the Drum), plus folksy revamps of hits by Nirvana and TLC (which were presumably too expensive to license in their original form) from singer Justine Bennett. But songs don’t come much more obscure or odd than the standout tracks of the series so far: Lord Sundance’s demented, narcissistic ’60s masterpiece Pretty Lord Sundance. Who is Lord Sundance, you ask? You got me; an online search for any background information, pictures or other releases from Sundance comes up empty. Ditto searches for Stanley Kirk and Ben Smith, the only credits on the label of the Triode Records single you can find online. If anybody out there knows anything, feel free to drop me a line and clue me in. If not, well, you’ll just have to settle for listening to a frog-voiced weirdo love and kiss himself over a blatant ripoff of The Hollywood Argyles’ Alley Oop. So be it.